What Is the Love of God?

John Piper

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Reading the Bible Supernaturally.

What is the love of God? What is it to be loved by God? The answer is: God sustains and exalts his holiness for your enjoyment forever. That’s the love of God.

The love of God is his passion to sustain and uphold and exalt his holiness and his Son for your everlasting enjoyment. If you put yourself at the center, you’re suicidal because it robs you of the very glory of God and his enjoyment.

Now if this happens — and I pray it happens that God would turn this generation into a generation passionate for the holiness of God — everything would change. Everything would change.

Your view of sin would change if he gave you a passion for the holiness of God. You would no longer think in terms of sin as the damaging of man, but as the dishonoring of God. You would no longer think of sin as the choice of pleasure, but the lust of pleasure.

It would change the way you view the righteousness of God. You would no longer think of the righteousness of God as simply doing what is right by you. You would think the righteousness of God is his unswerving allegiance to always be right by himself; that is, to exalt what is definitively worthy, namely his holiness and his glory.

It would change the way you look at the cross. Oh, it will be precious. You would think, “I love the cross. I love the cross.” But you would think about your love for the cross not like you’re told in so many of these books and so many sermons that there you can see how much you are valuable to God.

But rather, you would stand at the cross and see two things: You would see how infinitely valuable the holiness, the righteousness, and the honor of God is that when you trample it under foot by your sins, God knew the only way to vindicate his righteousness was to slay his own Son. That’s how serious your sin is. That’s how glorious God is. It’s not about your worth.

And the other thing that you will see at the cross is that this is how much he was willing to pay to make you happy in his holiness — if you will be changed.